ICE agent in Los Angeles, Youtube screenshot.

Since Donald Trump’ s inauguration, ICE has ramped up aggressive attempts to abduct and deport community members across the country. ICE’s tactics and strategies aren’t new. It’s important to remember that every president (yes, even Barack Obama & Joe Biden) and congress has increased ICE’s budget since its creation in 2003. ICE threatening more and more people has always been a logical conclusion of its existence. ICE must be abolished.

Trump’s current “Border Czar” Tom Homan (a West Carthage, New York native who began his career as a West Carthage Police Officer) was first appointed to an executive director position with ICE in 2013 by Obama. Obama gave Homan a Presidential Rank Award as a “Distinguished Executive” after Homan began arguing children should be separated from their parents in immigration custody. Now, Trump and feverish white nationalists in the Republican Party have prioritized taking ICE’s already despicable activity to new levels.

Trump’s new spending bill is expected to at least triple ICE’s annual budget from $10.4 billion in 2025 to more than $30 billion in 2026. That’s alongside billions of dollars to build more “detention centers” (they are concentration camps). The bill allocates at least $170 billion to policing the border. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimated in March that it would cost just $9.6 billion a year to provide permanent housing to every person who has lived in a homeless shelter this year. In 2021, the U.N. World Food Programme Executive Director estimated that it would cost $40 billion a year to end world hunger by 2030. Elites choose to use our communal resources against us instead of to empower us. So it is our responsibility to resist, rebel, and win.

Without the political power to abolish ICE today, we must make every step ICE takes as difficult as possible. We must ensure ICE agents are pariahs when they attempt to work (and recruit) in our communities. Anyone who chooses to work for (or with) ICE has........

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